Telephone-based customer service plays an increasingly important role for organizations involved in activities requiring direct communication with customers. In order to serve a maximum number of callers, call centers are typically designed to optimize call handling efficiency and telephone attendant productivity. Many conventional systems allow telephone attendants to service a greater number of callers by ascertaining the nature of a caller's request through collection, by a live attendant, of initial information from the caller, and transferring the call to a voice response unit to address the specific request of the caller. Other systems reverse the answer and collection process by connecting the caller initially to a voice response unit which collects information on the nature of a caller's request, which is ultimately used to route the call to an appropriate attendant.
An Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) is commonly utilized by call centers to enhance attendant productivity. An ACD allows a call center to cost-effectively handle a large number of calls by placing some of the calls in a holding queue when no attendants are available. When a call is placed in the holding queue, a greeting message identifying the called party is typically played to the caller, indicating that the next available attendant will service the call.
Call queuing plays an important role in call center operations and provides many advantages to the call center, including increased attendant productivity, by minimizing idle time for the attendant, simultaneous handling of a greater number of calls during an increase in calls, and encouragement of callers to wait for an available attendant, as opposed to requiring the caller to attempt another call in response to a busy signal. Call queuing, however, is perceived by customers to be a waste of their time, and may result in frustration, abandoned calls, a loss of business, and poor customer satisfaction when the holding time is deemed excessive.
Thus, in order to entertain callers waiting in a call queue, many call centers play music, news, weather or advertising messages to the caller during the holding period. In this manner, the caller may be entertained or informed of sales promotions for particular products or services. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,444,774 to Friedes discloses an Interactive Queuing System For Call Centers and suggests that music or advertising messages may be played to a caller on hold.
Unfortunately, such conventional call queuing entertainment systems have experienced only marginal success in satisfying callers placed in a holding queue. Since most callers can already access such conventional and freely available programming sources directly from their home, such programming is generally not a sufficient novelty or value to the caller, nor does it allow the caller to make effective use of the holding time, and it generally does not minimize the frustration experienced by the caller as a result of an excessive hold time.
Although it would be desirable for call centers to provide callers with a plurality of entertainment options, conventional systems for entertaining callers placed on hold by a call center do not permit a caller to select a desired entertainment option. If a call center could provide a caller with a number of valuable entertainment options while on hold, caller satisfaction and tolerance of excessive hold times would increase. In addition, the improved entertainment system could be advantageously marketed by the call center as an added customer service benefit.
As apparent from the above deficiencies with conventional systems for entertaining callers placed on hold by a call center, a need exists for an entertainment system that allows callers to receive a valuable entertainment option while on hold, such as the option to place a call to a third party, or access premium entertainment services such as shared-revenue telephone services. If a caller accesses the call center using a video phone, a further need exists for an entertainment system that allows the caller to access premium entertainment services which include video content, such as pay-per-view services. If the caller is connected to a support provider via the Internet, a need exists for a system which provides premium web content while on hold.